Choosing properties

Choosing Properties

Properties are advertised every Friday on this website (for Newham, Redbridge, Waltham Forest, Hackney, Havering, Barking and Dagenham and East Thames). Properties are advertised every Wednesday for London and Quadrant and Family Mosaic housing associations.

Adverts provide property, location and landlord details to help you decide which properties are right for you. Wherever possible we will also include photographs of properties. You can apply for properties where the registration category symbol and number of bedrooms appearing in the advert match your household's registration category and bedroom requirements.

The symbols that indicate the categories for Newham, Waltham Forest, Redbridge and Barking and Dagenham are:

The landlords letting properties have a legal duty to give reasonable preference to households with particular housing needs. To ensure that this duty is fulfilled it is anticipated that the vast majority of properties advertised will be let to registrants in the following categories:

Family Mosaic also use a lettering system but have only three bands. This means anyone from band A, B or C can bid on a property

Hackney uses a banding system – Emergency, Urgent, Priority/Homeless, General and Reserve. Once an applicant has been assessed, they are placed into one of the five bands according to their housing needs. Those with the highest priority are put in the Emergency band, those with no assessed priority are put in the Reserve band. Typically anyone can bid on any property for Hackney although the higher priority bands are obviously much more likely to be housed. Havering also have different bands, but again anyone can bid on any property. The symbol used by Hackney and Havering looks like this

Both London and Quadrant and East Thames use a numbered banding system and their symbols look like this

This means anyone from bands 1 to 4 can bid on a property

Some properties may also have special symbols:

shows that the property is reserved for people aged 50 or over

shows that the property is Sheltered and reserved for older people wanting independence with security.

‘Wheelchair symbol’ shows that the property is wheelchair accessible or has been adapted for some other disability and that priority will be given to bids from any households assessed as needing these adaptations - this priority varies with different councils

this symbol shows that Key Workers have a higher priority for this property.